We Had Nobody Help Us Hire Writers—You Do!

Hiring your first freelance business Blog Writer can be an overwhelming task—we know that. We had to scale our business from 1 to 45+ Writers and Editors in 18 months.

Why? In 2019, our content agency, ContentDistribution.com, started working on a project that turned out to be one of the most ambitious SEO campaigns of all time. In under 2 years, we grew our client from 0 to 1,500,000 organic monthly visitors a month.

To do that, we had to produce a high volume of top-notch content, and we needed to hire the best possible Writers we could find.

We went into the hiring process not really knowing what it looked like, and it quickly became a nightmare.

Applications would come in from various sources, and we had no means of keeping track of them. Candidates submitted incomplete applications, their portfolios were in Word, and they would contact us constantly via email. Everything became chaotic in no time.

We realized we had the wrong approach to hiring. We needed an automated hiring funnel that was dedicated to recruiting Writers. Since there was no such system, we decided to create one.

After countless hours of work and $100,000+ invested, we finally have Workello—an applicant tracking system that automates every step of the hiring process and allows you to hire the best candidates.

In the next few minutes, we’ll show you:

1. Where to find Real Estate Blog Writers for hire
2. Why it’s nearly impossible to find qualified Writers quickly if you’re doing everything manually
3. How automated testing can help you speed up the process and spot the best candidates

Where To Find Real Estate Blog Writers

We’ve used dozens of job boards to source Writers for our agency. Check out our top 15 picks with their pros and cons:

Continue reading the article, and you’ll find additional 30+ websites you can use to hire a Real Estate Blog Writer.

Why Finding High-Quality, Affordable Real Estate Blog Writers for Hire Seems Impossible

Companies that hire Real Estate Blog Writers face the same issues as companies that hire Developers. The best candidates get off the market in an instant as there are so many job openings available all the time.

With the best Writers getting hired quickly, the reality is that every job board suffers from the majority of their users being underqualified candidates who usually struggle to get hired.

If you want to find that rare top-performing candidate that is still available, you will need to evaluate and test each applicant fast enough to hire the best Writer before another company does.

This doesn’t sound like a huge deal when there are a handful of applicants, but once hundreds of applications start flying in from various job boards, you’ll become overwhelmed in no time. That’s what happened to us.

We initially posted job ads on Upwork exclusively but soon spread out to various other job boards to tap into a larger talent pool.

With every website we used, we faced the same issues:

• There was no option to sort candidates by their status in our hiring funnel
• We didn’t have any settings specific to hiring Writers
• Portfolios were an inaccurate representation of candidates’ skills

With every new job board, these problems only intensified instead of getting solved. New applications would come in from email, Glassdoor, SimplyHired, Indeed, Facebook, Craigslist, and so on. Regardless of the source, we always struggled with:

• Tracking candidates
• Keeping a record of applications and replying to candidates on time
• Taking note of candidates that we liked initially
• Contacting promising candidates fast enough
• Lowering the number of unqualified applicants

We went on a hunt for an ATS that would solve all of these problems in one go, and we couldn’t find one that would do everything the way we wanted it to. That’s what motivated us to work on Workello—a system specifically designed for hiring Writers.

Pre-Employment Testing Is Difficult—You Can Make It Easy

With every job listing, you get a bundle of applications from unqualified candidates—with writing positions, the number of such candidates grows exponentially.

It’s difficult to understand how good someone is at writing from their portfolio alone—nobody shares their worst examples and unedited work. You need to introduce pre-hire testing to gauge your candidates’ skill set. If they can’t write a stellar test, how can they create high-quality content?

If you go down this route, you’ll need assistance. Keeping track of hundreds of candidates, sending and collecting tests, taking care of correspondence—it quickly turns into a disaster if you do it manually. Reliable skill assessment software will keep you organized and allow you to focus on other tasks. 

Workello is a high-volume recruiting solution that will help you automate assessments and the hiring process in general. Here’s how it works:

1. Sign up for free and set up your hiring funnel in under 3 minutes
2. Post job ads on your favorite job platforms and add a Workello link
3. Review applications from your dashboard
4. Send tests to filter high-quality writers from bad ones quickly
5. Reject, interview, and hire the best applicants

Hire the Top 1% Fast With Workello’s Pre-Hire Assessments

With Workello, you can assess, test, reject, interview, and hire candidates with a single click—all actions are available on your single-page dashboard. Move candidates through the funnel by changing their application status, and Workello will do the rest.

You can use our platform to send out copywriting, content writing, and technical writing tests automatically. If you’re looking for someone in the SEO department, make sure to test your SEO writers and SEO copywriters. Workello also supports content marketer testing.

Use our free trial and cut your hiring costs in half with an automated hiring funnel.

Hiring Funnel of a Top 1% Hiring Agency

Before we could develop an automated hiring funnel, we needed to break down our hiring process and see which aspects caused issues. Here’s what we jotted down:

1. Having blog articles that attract visitors requires high-quality content
2. Producing high-quality content demands top-notch Blog Writers educated on the matter
3. Finding a Writer that would always deliver means evaluating hundreds of applicants
4. Getting to the best candidates requires sorting out bad ones quickly
5. Spotting bad Writers—that was our problem

Whenever we posted a job ad, we always received more than enough applications. Our issue was not knowing what to do with those applications once we got them.

We went back to the drawing board and decided on the features that the new hiring system needed to have to make it worth our while. Those features included:

1. A platform that would gather all applications in one place, regardless of the source
2. An automated candidate sorting system that would allow us to change their status in a flash
3. A single dashboard to evaluate, test, interview, and hire Blog Writers
4. An automatically-sent test to single out bad Writers with impressive portfolios
5. Automated email correspondence to save time and remove the possibility of human error

Our first step was Google Sheets + Google Forms + Zapier. It wasn’t an ideal solution, but it pointed us in the right direction. After countless tweaks and trial-and-error phases, Workello was born.

Attract Top Real Estate Blog Writers With a High-Quality Job Ad

Your job description can be the difference between hiring the best Real Estate Blog Writer available and receiving thousands of unsuitable applications.

While there’s no magic trick to remove unqualified candidates completely, a quality job description can reduce their number significantly. A well-written job description goes into detail about the role and provides candidates with a clear idea of what the role entails.

You should list out every specific requirement you demand, as well as all the responsibilities that your new employee will have. The more specific you get, the less likely it becomes that unqualified candidates will apply en masse.

When writing the description, you should keep in mind the fact that top Writers can find a job easily. You should provide them with a reason why they should accept your offer over any other.

List out all benefits that come with working in your company, such as career advancement, salary increase, learning opportunities, health plans, and so on.

If you’re not quite sure what your job description should look like or what specific role you need to hire, don’t worry. We have a comprehensive database of pre-vetted job description templates you can use for free.

Click on a role title to find the template you need. All you have to do is adapt the content to fit your company’s needs, and you can post your listing on any job board!

• Writer
• Content Writer
• Website Content Writer
• E-Commerce Content Writer
• Business Writer
• Blog Writer
• Technical Writer
• Catalog Writer
• Law Firm Content Writer
• Freelance Writer
• Copywriter
• Digital Content Writer
• Course Writer
• Senior Writer
• SEO Writing

Distribute Your Job Ad Across the Internet

Back in 2019, when we started scaling our business rapidly, our Content Managers had to deal with online job ad distribution. Posting job ads on various websites isn’t difficult, but it takes time and focus away from their actual job, which is content production.

Looking for new Writers to satisfy the demand for content meant people who were already there were being less productive because of it.

Still, we couldn’t hire a new person to deal with it that easily. We didn’t document our hiring process and couldn’t educate someone new to delegate that job to them. Documenting the process is a time-consuming task we wouldn’t wish upon anyone, but we had to do it. You don’t!

When you sign up for Workello for free, you’ll be able to use our documentation and delegate job ad distribution to someone else with ease!

All Applications in the Same Dashboard—Never Lose a Candidate Again

With our dashboard, you can post your job ads on as many websites as you want, without your HR department getting a headache.

The innovation the dashboard brings is that it gathers all applications in one place and lets your Recruitment Managers view them all instantly, without having to visit each job board and log applications individually.

You can achieve this by adding the same Workello-hosted application form to all job ads. This way, not only do you have all applications going to the same place, but you’ll also have a unified application format.

Candidates won’t be able to submit incomplete applications, and you won’t have to follow up asking them to send you a missing document, like a portfolio.

Check out an application example.

Watch Candidates Stream In

The beauty of the dashboard lies in the fact that you can complete the entire hiring process on one page. It allows you to evaluate candidates, test them, invite them for an interview, and extend an offer to the best Writers with only a few clicks.

To move candidates through your funnel, you only need to change their candidate status by choosing one of the options from the drop-down menu. The available statuses are:

1. Application Received
2. Application Rejected
3. Test Candidate
4. Test Complete
5. Reject Candidate
6. Invite for Interview
7. Send Offer

Each status is color-coded so that you can see how many candidates you have in each stage at a glance.

Reject Unqualified Blog Writers

When an application shows up in your dashboard, your Content Managers and Editors can take a look at it and evaluate the candidate. If they don’t find the candidate qualified, they can remove them from the funnel by selecting the “Application Rejected” option.

This action will trigger an automated email sent to the candidate to inform them politely that you won’t consider them for the position.

The automation saves you time since you don’t have to notify candidates manually and they won’t clutter your inbox by inquiring about their application status.

Point, Click, Test

If a candidate submits an impressive application, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re a perfect fit for your company. Note that most Writers can create formidable portfolios, but they rarely match Writers’ actual skills.

Writers use only their best work in their portfolios, which is the final product that has gone through at least one editing phase. Portfolios will never give you an insight into their 1st draft quality. To see that, you will have to test them.

In the beginning, we didn’t test candidates and would hire Writers based on their applications alone. This was a costly mistake.

We hired dozens of Writers that charged thousands of dollars for content we couldn’t publish. Instead, our Editors had double the workload editing or rewriting bad Writers’ content.

We decided never to repeat this mistake again, and automated testing was one of the main reasons why we started working on Workello.

If a candidate passes the initial evaluation, you can change their status to “Test Candidate.” When this happens, the candidate will receive an automated email that:

1. Congratulates them on reaching the next stage
2. Includes a link to the writing test

Clicking on the link will lead them to a page that looks like this:

How To Make a Good Test

When you create a test, you should make it so it gives you a clear insight into Blog Writers’ skill set regarding:

1. Language use
2. Article formatting
3. Research skills
4. Familiarity with real estate and mortgage

While the test needs to be complex enough for you to assess each element of their work, you need to be careful and not overdo it. A perfect test hits the right balance between thoroughness and a Writer’s willingness to complete it.

You can create a 2,500-word test that would take 8+ hours to finish. Such a test might answer all your demands for evaluation, but it’ll be of little use if nobody wants to do it. Don’t forget that you’re asking them to do a task for a job they may not land. 

Consider this test a sample, not a comprehensive article.

Luckily for you, Workello helps you be more thorough in your testing. From the moment they apply, candidates will receive emails with information about their application status and your selection process in general. They will be informed every step of the way.

Blog Writers will appreciate such transparency and professionalism and will be willing to put in extra effort for a serious company that’s worth their time.

If you don’t know how to formulate your test, you can take a look at the test we use to hire Content Writers and find inspiration for your real estate blog writing demands.

Interviewing Candidates

Once the candidate submits their work, they will automatically move to the next stage in the funnel—Test Complete.

Your Content Managers and Editors will be able to view the test and assess the candidate’s skills. When they complete the review, they can change the candidate status to one of these two options:

1. Reject Candidate—Sends an automated email notifying the candidate their test wasn’t good enough
2. Invite for Interview—Sends an automated email allowing the candidate to schedule a Zoom meeting via a Calendly link

The Candidate Status Page

Your candidates will love Workello too. We’ve created the Candidate Status page that applicants can access and find all the information they need.

The page contains news about their application status, as well as a “What to expect next” section that details your selection process.

Thanks to this page, candidates know exactly what’s going on at each hiring stage. They won’t have to reach out to your Recruitment Managers for information, and you won’t have to stress about losing a top Writer because your Managers failed to respond to an email.

Take a look at the Candidate Status page here.

Our Investment Paid Off Big Time

Hiring a Real Estate Blog Writer sounds all too easy when you have a system that optimizes the whole process and automates every element of it. When we were on our content gold rush, we had no system to rely on, and hiring new Writers was a nightmare.

Hundreds of applications would fly in every day from various job boards and overwhelm us. We had no way of keeping track of them, we didn’t know when we received a new application, and we had to deal with incomplete applications all the time.

Our hiring process was too pedestrian, and we took weeks to get back to candidates. The best Writers would receive a different offer or grow disinterested before we reached out to them.

Our Managers and Editors had to distribute job ads online and couldn’t focus on what they did best—producing content. Our whole agency was suffering from our inefficient hiring funnel.

We realized we had to change that. After investing $100,000+ and invaluable time and brainpower into creating an automated hiring funnel, we finished Workello and managed to:

1. Grow our company from 1 to 45+ Writers and Editors in under 18 months
2. Lower the cost of content by 75%
3. Carry out one of the most successful SEO campaigns ever
4. Let our Content Managers and Editors do their job and delegate job ads to someone else

It took us years and thousands of dollars to have this system. You can now have it for the price of a single page of content!

Try out Workello for free! We’ve set it up so that you can start accepting new candidates in under 3 minutes.

Additional Job Boards To Find Real Estate Blog Writers for Hire

Thanks to Workello, you can post job listings on every job board you can find without worrying about overextending. You can expand to as many websites as you want and access the entire pool of remote Writers available to you.

Check out the following websites:

• Editorial Freelancers Association
• Freelance Content Marketing Writer group
• Storyhackers
• Virtual Assistant Finder
• Freelancer
• Mediabistro
• Zerys
• Clarity
• PeoplePerHour
• Certified Writers
• The Writer Finder
• Writers Work
• FinCon Community
• NAHJ
• Society of Professional Journalists
• WriteLife Facebook group
• Pitchwhiz
• Journalism Jobs
• CloudPeeps
• ASJA
• NABJ
• ContentGrow
• WriterAccess
• Staffing agencies
• Scribewise
• Pod Reacher
• NASW
• Skyword
• Scripted
• Muck Rack
• Alexis Grant Media
• Copify
• Craigslist
• HireMyMom
• Masthead Media